Exiting Smartly and only going with StashAway

There’s been a lot happening in our household. Even though it was good to have the helper around, it turned out to be a mismatch of expectations on both sides. Especially when it came to taking care of the baby. I feel that it was mostly our fault for not communicating our expectations of the helper from the onset and even when the nanny was here to help out with the handover.

The helper didn’t step up to the challenge and it was clear after 2 weeks in that this is not going to work out. So we decided to let the helper go because we reckon she would be happier in another household. She was surprised and upset at how quickly we came to this decision. But she understood the situation better after we explained to her in detail.

Anyway, the maid agency has assisted to transfer the helper to another household that is more suitable for her. Primarily one without a baby to take care of because she just doesn’t have the confidence yet. We considered keeping and training her but decided there wasn’t enough of a foundation to work off. Because we don’t think she is as willing to learn as she says she is.

This is a bad outcome because we waited a few months for the helper to come in and even re-engaged the nanny to assist with her training. We may have learnt how to be better employers but it has been a costly experience in terms of time and money. We have gone back to the maid agency with more specific requirements and a bigger focus on past employers’ testimonials for a new helper. Let’s see what happens.

It’s an interesting link between this bad experience with our first helper and the topic of this post on robo-advisors. In the past few months, I blogged about how Smartly is going through a major platform upgrade and is unable to accept new deposits for investing. I stood by Smartly and was willing to give them time to resume this service. But their timeline kept getting delayed.

The whole point of me having an investment portfolio with a robo-advisor is the convenience. That’s why I’m willing to pay an annual platform fee (based on AUM) to the robo-advisor so they can manage all aspects of my investment portfolio. I just have to automate my funds transfers into my robo-advisor account and they should take care of the rest. Minimal work from my end to monitor but I remain vested in the markets with an investment strategy employed by the robo-advisor.

Imagine the frustration when I have to keep contacting Smartly to ask about when I can resume depositing funds into my account again. And I keep hearing about this major platform upgrade that never seemed to materialise. Smartly hasn’t been updating their platform since they started and this is what happens when they do their first one.

Investing with a robo-advisor is supposed to be easy and fuss-free. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes you lose confidence in the service provider. As my frustration built because other parts of my life are not going well (like the situation with my helper), I decided to pull the plug on Smartly. Too much effort for too little reward. Interesting how one aspect affects another in my life.

A few years ago, I blogged about having both Smartly and StashAway robo-advisor accounts because I want to see which service provider I would choose in the end. It never made sense to have more than 1 robo-advisor account and I was always going to have to decide which one to go with.

While a few more service providers have entered the robo-advisory business, I have not considered setting up accounts with them. I just wanted to make my decision and be done with it. Not to keep exploring more options by opening other robo-advisor accounts.

Since then, StashAway has improved significantly in terms of its user interface and product offering – both on the desktop and mobile app. They have a strong team that is focused on the customer and you can see that in the way their product has developed over the years. I like their educational engagement of the public and the continual effort made to add value to their robo-advisory service.

With this move to exit Smartly, StashAway has become my sole robo-advisor service provider of choice. I hope to increasingly rely on them to meet my wider investment needs. Such as income distribution and cash management. Which means I may take a closer look at Stashaway’s Income and Cash Management Portfolios.

The idea is to eventually use StashAway as a full-service wealth management service. Where they can manage much more of my financial assets and their growth & allocation going forward. Without me having to step in and monitor. This will be what makes the annual platform fee (based on AUM) worth it as long as it remains reasonable.